pantomime, because they are only familiar with movement used to describe functional or verbal actions. Only after children know how to work with the elements of the art will they know how to dance and have the ability to build dances about ideas or images.
For teaching purposes, the basic elements of dance include the body, space, force, and time. There are numerous ways to categorize body parts and body moves. Body parts includes outer parts such as head, shoulders, and rib cage and inner parts such as heart, lungs, and muscles. Body moves include stretching and bending, twisting and circling, rising and collapsing, swinging, swaying, and shaking. Basic steps can be organized into walk, jump, and hop. Run, leap, skip, gallop, and slide are variations of combinations of the three basic steps. Even when people are not moving, their bodies are making shapes in space, at a certain level. When they move, each move has direction, size, focus, a place, and a pathway. These are the elements of space used in dance. All movements can be altered by changes in force, depending on
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